The Resurrection stories are replete
with people failing to recognize Jesus until he says or does
something evocative, puzzling even serious Christians. Skeptics use
these appearances to suggest that Resurrection witnesses succumbed to
a kind of transference, seeming to recognize Jesus in one of his
followers, or succumbed to a wish-fulfilling delusion.

Christians counter that if skeptics
were correct, why would the chroniclers of the Gospels have admitted
that these Resurrection witnesses did not immediately recognize the
risen Christ? Why not sanitize the Resurrection stories to delete
this inconvenient fact?

Understanding the Resurrection is
beyond human comprehension, and Christians believe that getting their
minds around it completely is of little importance in relation to
conforming themselves entirely to Christ. Still, is there a way, a
coherent explanation if you will, that might give us some insight,
however feeble, into how a person could be unrecognizable while
remaining the same person, how a person could move through locked
doors, how a person could be transported instantaneously from place
to place?

Newtonian physics made no allowances
for a Resurrection event in which person might move at will across
time and space, in which he might  while remaining substantial 
pass through closed doors, in which he might be the same person who
multiplied the loaves and changed water into wine, while not being
immediately recognizable to his closest disciples. Such a Jesus was
ghostly or allegorical from the perspective of Newtonian science.

A clue to an explanation for how these
appearances might be reconciled with science and reason can be found
in the 1884 book, Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions, by
the mathematician and theologian, Edwin A. Abbott, who uses the
example of “flat” creatures that live in only two dimensions
(length and width) on a plane, or on the surface of a sheet of paper,
for example. These creatures can only see and move along the surface
of the plane, having no comprehension of height. Thus, a
three-dimensional creature, like a human being, could hover over
these plane creatures, look down on them, while being invisible to
these creatures. Furthermore, a “locked room” in the plane
creatures’ world could be “entered” by a three-dimensional
creature “descending” into the room and intersecting the plane
within the room. The three-dimensional creature “magically”
appears to the plane creatures because these creatures cannot
comprehend, or “see”, the third dimension (height) from which the
three-dimensional creature descends, only perceiving the 3-D creature
when it intersects the plane.

As to appearance, imagine that these
plane creatures are circles of different sizes. From above  the
perspective of the three-dimensional creature  the plane creatures
look like circles, but to the plane creatures they appear to be lines
of different lengths, because the plane creatures are looking along
the plane (surface) rather than observing from “above”. If a
circle is cut from a piece of paper and observed along the edge of
the paper, a line will be observed rather than a circle, and the
length of this line will be the diameter of the circle. A particular
plane creature (circle) always looks the same to other plane
creatures because it is the same length regardless of another plane
creature’s vantage point.

Now imagine that one of these plane
creatures (circles) acquires a third dimension and becomes a sphere.
For our example, we can liken this sphere to the risen Christ. Now
existing in three dimensions, this sphere can descend into and
intersect the plane and  this is the important point  the size
of the intersecting circle made by the sphere  and the line
observed by the plane creatures  may be a different length,
though it is exactly the same sphere. As the sphere passes through
the plane, it first produces a point, then an increasingly larger
circle, than an increasingly smaller circle, then a point again, with
the flatlanders perceiving these circles as lines. Thus, one plane
creature observes a longer line, while another observes a shorter
line, while a third observes a line of another length, but all are
produced by the same sphere intersecting the plane.

Far from this three-dimensional
creature being “ghostly”, it is more substantial than a
two-dimensional creature, as a sphere is more substantial than a
circle by virtue of having an additional dimension.

In The Creator and the Cosmos,
physicist Dr. Hugh Ross, using the Flatland analogy, states,
“A three-dimensional being then could approach the plane of the
flatlanders and place his hand just a tenth of a millimeter above the
two-dimensional bodies of two flatlanders separated from one another
by just one centimeter. Since the three-dimensional being is slightly
above the plane of the flatlanders, there is no possibility that the
flatlanders can see him. And yet, the three-dimensional being is a
hundred times closer to each of the flatlanders than they are to each
other.

“As with the flatlanders, so it is
with human beings. God is closer to each of us than we can ever be to
one another. But because God’s proximity to us takes place in
dimensions we cannot tangibly experience, we cannot possibly see
Him.”

Engineer/physicist Jack Sacco has
written extensively on the Shroud of Turin and its relation to
the Resurrection. Invoking the principles of quantum mechanics in an
article written for Magnificat, Sacco describes a Person
possessing these additional dimensions as in a “Super-Ordered
State”, an atomically reordered state in which the “body would
exhibit characteristics heretofore unknown to modern science…not
subject to the laws of time and space, as we traditionally perceive
them…could, in its entirety, be in an unlimited number of places at
any given time…could pass through solids with ease…could manifest
itself in time and space without becoming subject to the constraints
of times and space.”

According to Hugh Ross, “Because
human beings can visualize phenomena only in dimensions that they can
experience, in their attempts to describe God, they characterize Him
as Being confined to a four-dimensional box. One reason we know the
Bible comes from a supernatural source is that, just like the
implications from the recent measurings of the cosmos, it claims that
God is not so confined  He transcends the space-time continuum of
the universe. In its unique insistence that God moves and operates in
dimensions independent of length, width, height, and time, the Bible
not only insists on extra-dimensional capacities for God, but it also
specifically describes how He functions in these extra dimensions.”

String theory, a concept that many
physicists believe provides a fundamental description of nature,
suggests that the building blocks of everything are super-tiny
strings that move and oscillate, and how these strings oscillate
determines what our measuring devices register: electrons, photons,
quarks, etc. String theory relies on nine or ten dimensions, meaning
there are six to seven dimensions that are “invisible” to human
beings, like height to flatlanders. It is postulated that these extra
dimensions are too small (physicists refer to them as being
“compactified”) to be detectable. Another explanation is that we
are “stuck” in a 3+1 (three spatial plus one time) dimensional
subspace of a full universe. Suffice it to say that quantum physics 
this isn’t science fiction  needs these extra dimensions to be
coherent. The world’s big colliders (Hadron, etc.) are seeking to
identify these extra dimensions indirectly via the activity and
behavior of super-tiny particles.

All of this isn’t intended to be a
scientific explanation of the Resurrection, but to demonstrate that
what we can perceive and measure as human beings is constrained by
our intellects, our measuring devices, and perhaps our imaginations.

Faith doesn’t
require scientific explanations, or plane creatures, or a fantasy
involving dimensions, or quantum mechanics. Still, this is an
imaginative way to explain how a person in a glorified body, having
reentered the dimensions of Heaven, could initially be unfamiliar,
and could move in time and space in ways that are inaccessible to
mortal beings constrained by four-dimensions.

Honest science and reason, seasoned
with a healthy does of humility, are never adversaries to faith. The
Resurrection changed the world, and may have given us a glimpse of
the dimensions of Heaven.

About the Author

Thomas M. Doran

Thomas M. Doran is a professional engineer, an adjunct professor of civil engineering at Lawrence Technological University, and a member of the College of Fellows of The Engineering Society of Detroit. He is also the author of Toward the Gleam, Terrapin, and Iota (October 2014), all published by Ignatius Press.

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